I wrote a series of blog posts over on Quora about a couple of concepts in the design of Magic: the Gathering called mana fixing and mana acceleration, examining six specific cards from recent sets that perform similar roles but are each different.They’re intended to be for someone who knows very little about the game, and are mostly an attempt to think through what makes each of these utility cards in the game different and how good they are within the set they were printed. The posts, in order:

Writing on Quora’s new blog post editor was a joy; it’s the best rich-text editing I’ve done on the web short of Google Docs (which almost doesn’t count) and has a barebones but really slick draft management system (which I wish they would add to their iOS app).

This is also the first public writing I’ve done about Magic: the Gathering. I’m still hardly an expert at the game so I would love to hear from anyone who has questions or concerns about the accuracy of what I wrote.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go give myself a swirly for writing 3500 words about six cards from Magic: the Gathering.